Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

Oil Majors Report Second Quarter Results+

this week saw the first batch of 2nd quarter reports to shareholders from the major international oil companies, which for the most part showed much poorer earnings than a year ago, and which were generally worse than analysts had expected...recall that when we looked at these reports in earlier quarters, it was the small independent drillers that were piling up the big losses and going bankrupt, while the vertically integrated oil majors, which were also seeing losses in the exploration and exploitation segments of their business, were saved by profits from their refining operations that in some cases more than doubled, as they benefited from some the widest margins on refined products in history...now, with the glut of gasoline and all other refined products, prices for those products have fallen as well, and refining margins shrank even as oil prices rose during the April through June period...hence, the oil majors are not only seeing reduced profits or losses in their oil field operations, but they're also barely making anything on the refining side of their business as well...

as we mentioned, this week's release of oil data for the week ending July 22nd from the US Energy Information Administration showed unseasonably large increases in our stored supply of both crude oil and gasoline; that was largely due to a big jump in oil imports and the mix of products coming out of refineries, because oil consumption by refineries dropped to below seasonal levels...at the same time, this week's crude oil fudge factor included to make the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet (line 13) balance was +550,000 barrels per day, which meant that 550,000 more barrels per day showed up in our final consumption and inventory figures this week than were accounted for by our production or import figures, meaning one or several of this week's metrics were off by that amount, errors which are typically due to shortfalls in reporting or gathering that data...that's the 5th week in a row that we've seen a large positive adjustment, and as a result this year's cumulative daily average of that weekly statistical adjustment is now up to a positive 36,000 barrels per day...during much of this this year, that adjustment had been negative, meaning much of what we had appeared to have produced or imported did not show up in the final consumption or inventory figures....that statistical aberration has now completely reversed..

our field production of crude oil rose for the 3rd week in a row, as oil output from US wells rose by 21,000 barrels per day to an average of 8,515,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 15th, entirely on a 33,000 barrel per day increase in production from Alaska...but oil production from the lower 48 states was down just 12,000 barrels per day, a slowing in the rate of decline...but even with production up 3 weeks in a row, our oil output still remained 704,000 barrels per day below the pace we saw at the beginning of this year, which was also 9.5% lower than the 9,413,000 barrels we produced during the week ending July 24th of 2015, and 11.4% lower than the record 9,610,000 barrel per day oil production that we saw during the week ending June 5th last year...

at the same time, the EIA reported that our imports of crude oil rose by an average of 303,000 barrels per day to an average of 8,437,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 22nd, just 2,000 barrels per day shy of the 42 week high for oil imports we saw during the week ending June 17th....this week's imports were nearly 900,000 barrels per day, or 11.8% more than the 7,545,000 barrels of oil per day we were importing during the week ending July 24th a year ago, while the 4 week average of our imports reported by the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) rose to an average of 8.2 million barrels per day, 8.7% above the same four-week period last year...

meanwhile, crude oil usage by US refineries dropped by 277,000 barrels per day to an average of 16,586,000 barrels of crude per day in this week's report...that was as the US refinery utilization rate fell to 92.4% for the week ending July 22nd, down from 93.2% of capacity the prior week and down from the refinery utilization rate of 95.1% logged during the week ending July 24th last year...crude oil refining fell by 95,000 barrels per day on the east coast, and was now at a level 12% below a year ago, indicating that the New York area products glut is having an impact on refinery operations there...nationally, crude oil refined this week was just over 1.0% less than the 16,762,000 barrels per day US refineries used during the week ending July 24th last year, and on a par with the equivalent week in 2014...

even with the drop in oil being refined, however, US refineries production of gasoline still inched up by 18,000 barrels per day to 10,068,000 barrels per day during week ending July 22nd, as east coast refineries still managed to produce an average of 3,316,000 barrels of gasoline per day, 67,000 barrels per day more than the prior week and 4.2% more than a year earlier....that increase meant that this week's gasoline production was 4.0% greater than the 9,681,000 barrels per day of gasoline produced during the equivalent week a year ago, despite the refinery slowdown....however, refinery output of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) did drop during this week, falling by 86,000 barrels per day to 4,918,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 22nd...that left our distillates output 3.5% below the distillates production of 5,096,000 barrels per day during the week ending June 24th of last year......

in the graph above, which was sourced from page 12 of the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf), the blue line shows the recent track of US gasoline inventories over the period from December 2014 to July 22nd,, 2016, while the grey shaded area represents the range of US gasoline inventories as reported weekly by the EIA over the prior 5 years for any given time of year, thus showing us the normal range of US gasoline inventories as they fluctuate from season to season, normally falling during the driving season every summer and rising in winter...note that gasoline inventories first rose out of that prior trend in January of this year, and by February had set a new record high...then, instead of falling rapidly during the spring as it had in prior years, this year gasoline inventories remained elevated throughout the spring, and once they started rising 6 weeks ago, it didn't take much for them to hit a record for this time of year...gasoline inventories thus ended this week 11.8% higher than the 215,922,000 barrels of gasoline that we had stored on July 24th last year, and also 10.6% higher than the 218,236,000 barrels of gasoline we had stored on July 25th of 2014... thus our gasoline supplies remain categorized by the EIA as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..

meanwhile, our distillate fuel inventories fell by 780,000 barrels to 152,003,000 barrels on July 22nd, which left them still well above the distillate inventories of 148,939,000 on the 1st of July...since our distillate inventories have continued to run far above the normal level since our warm winter reduced US heat oil consumption, our distillate inventories as of July 22nd were still 5.5% higher than the 148,939,000 barrels of distillates we had stored as of July 24th last year, and 20.0% higher than our distillates supplies as of July 25th 2014, and thus they are still characterized as "above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year...

finally, as our refineries failed to keep pace with our increased level of imports, we found ourselves with 1,671,000 more barrels of oil than we needed this week, which was subsequently added to our stocks of crude in storage, and hence our crude oil inventories rose to 521,133,000 barrels as of July 22nd, the first increase in oil stocks in 10 weeks....that meant we ended up with 13.4% more oil in storage than the 459,682,000 barrels we had as of the same weekend a year earlier, and 41.9% more oil than we had stored on July 25th of 2014....since our oil supplies first topped 500 million early this year, and first topped 400 million in January of 2015, it goes without saying that our crude oil supplies also remain "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..."

This week's rig counts

even though it was just by one more rig, US drilling activity increased for the 8th week out of the past 9 weeks during the week ending July 29th, even as oil prices fell....Baker Hughes reported that the total count of active rotary rigs running in the US rose by 1 to 463 rigs as of Friday, which was still down from the 874 rigs that were deployed as of the July 31st report last year, and down from the recent high of 1929 rigs that were in use on November 21st of 2014...the number of rigs drilling for oil this week rose by 3 rigs to 374, which was still down from the 664 oil directed rigs that were in use a year earlier, and down from the recent high of 1609 oil rigs that were drilling on October 10, 2014, while the count of drilling rigs targeting natural gas formations fell by two rigs to 86 this week, which was also down from the 209 natural gas rigs that were drilling a year ago, and down from the recent high of 1,606 rigs that were drilling for natural gas on August 29th, 2008...there were also three rigs drilling this week that were classified as miscellaneous, unchanged from last week but up from the single miscellaneous rig that was drilling the same week a year ago....

even with the negligible overall increase, another rig was added offshore from Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, which brought the Gulf of Mexico active rig count back up to 19 rigs, which was still down from 34 Gulf of Mexico rigs a year ago...however, the offshore platform that had been working off the Cook Inlet in Alaska was shut down, which left the total offshore count unchanged at 19, which was also down from 34 offshore a year earlier...at the same time, there was a single new rig that started drilling through an inland lake in southern Louisiana, which brought the inland waters rig count up to 4, which was still down from the 5 rigs that were deployed drilling on inland waters at the end of the same week last year...

the number of working horizontal drilling rigs fell for the 2nd time in 9 weeks, as the count of active horizontal rigs dropped by 3 rigs to 354 rigs, which also was down from the 664 horizontal rigs that were in use on July 31st of last year, and down from the record of 1372 horizontal rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014...at the same time, 4 more directional rigs were added, bringing the directional rig count back up to 48, which was still down from the 84 directional rigs that were in use at the end of the same week a year earlier...meanwhile, the vertical rig count was unchanged at 61 rigs this week, which was down from the 126 vertical rigs that were drilling in the US during the same week last year...

for the details on which states and which shale basins saw changes in drilling activity this past week, we'll again include a screenshot of that part of the rig count summary from Baker Hughes, which shows those changes...the first table below shows weekly and annual rig count changes by state, and the second table shows weekly and annual rig count changes for the major geological oil and gas basins...in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of July 29th, the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs over the last week, the third column shows last week's July 22nd rig count, the 4th column shows the change in the number of rigs running from the equivalent week in July a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that week a year ago, which in this case was July 31st of 2015:

here we can see that the change in the overall rig count that the press characterized as 'negligible' masks quite a bit of activity across the nation...for instance, even though the Texas rig count was down by 3 rigs to 214, drilling in the Permian basin in the western part of the state still increased by 4 active rigs, as 3 rigs were idled that had been working in the Barnett shale near Dallas, and another 2 rigs in the Eagle Ford of south Texas were also shut down...also note that Ohio saw its rig count rise by 1 rig to 13 with the addition of another rig in the Utica, while the Marcellus dropped a rig by virtue of pulling 2 rigs from West Virginia and adding 1 rig in Pennsylvania...also note that Mississippi, which is not included among major producing states above, saw the addition of a rig this week, bringing the state count up to 3 rigs....Mississippi also had 3 rigs deployed on July 31st of 2015....

the above table shows the expected output of oil and natural gas for July and August for the 7 major shale basins, which together account for 92% of US shale output... oil in thousands of barrels per day is shown in the 3 columns on the left, while projections for natural gas in million cubic feet per day is shown in the three columns to the right...note the change columns in each case is in units, not percent, and thus total oil production in most basins other than the Permian is expected to fall on the order of 4%, while the percentage drop in total US production of natural gas is primarily from the Eagle Ford and Niobrara (map from the report of all 7 regions is here)

the next table, from under Tab 1 of the report, shows the drilling productivity for new wells on a per rig basis...the EIA estimates new-well production per rig using several months of recent data on total production from new wells for each field, divided by the region's monthly rig count....here, in all regions, drilling productivity for new wells is still expected to increase monthly from July to August, as it has over the history of fracking extraction...

the next two graphs, from the Year-over-year summary (pdf), show the expected drop in August production from old wells, as compared to the decrease from old wells in August a year ago...in general, these graphs shows us the expected well depletion rate for the existing wells in each basin...

above is the expected decrease in thousands of barrels per day for the wells currently producing oil in each basin...again, since this is in units of decrease, rather than percentage, it tells us the obvious, that those basins with the largest amount of current production will see the largest decreases...anyone who wants to work out the percentage declines for each basin based on our first table can do so....what is noteworthy here is that for the most part, the decreases going forward will be less than in 2015, because of the larger percentage of old wells which deplete somewhat slower...the Utica, with a large percentage of relatively newer wells, is the only basin where the August 2016 oil depletion rate is expected to be greater than that of last year

like the oil graph, the natural gas bar graph above shows us the expected August decrease in million cubic feet per day for the wells currently producing gas in each basin, against the similar decrease in August 2015...once again, for most basins, the decreases in natural gas output going forward will be less than they were in 2015, because of the larger percentage of old wells..the exceptions are again the Utica, with it's larger percentage of newer wells, and the Permian, which has been producing more natural gas recently than it had in the legacy years...

the next two graphs we'll include are for oil and natural gas productivity for new Utica wells...once again, the EIA is estimating August output from new wells based on recent historical data on total production from new wells divided by the region's average monthly rig count, lagged by two months...in this first graph below, the total Utica rig count since 2007 is shown in black, while the output of oil per rig from new wells is shown as a brown graph over that same span...

in the second graph of this set below, the total Utica rig count is again shown in black, while the output of natural gas from new wells per rig in thousand cubic feet per day in shown in blue...now, look closely as those productivity lines, brown above for oil and blue below for natural gas...we can see that oil output per new Utica well has quadrupled from under 100 barrels per day to nearly 400 barrels per day in the short span from mid 2014 to mid 2016...similarly, natural gas output per new Utica well has tripled, from 2,500,000 cubic feet per day to 7,500,000 cubic feet per day over the same 2 year span (after it had quadrupled in the prior two years, so there's been a twelve-fold increase per new well in 4 years)...also notice that neither the brown line for oil nor the blue line for natural gas shows any sign of topping out, ie, if the trend continues, we might even expect another tripling two years hence...so, why such a exponentially increasing rate of productivity? in part, it’s because the frackers are getting better at what they do; ie, their fracking techniques have improved...but another big factor is that with prices depressed, they're no longer fracking half the state willy-nilly, like Chesapeake did during the McClendon era...they are only fracking in those locations where they believe that profitable production is pretty much a sure thing, and hence they're now producing as much gas and oil from new wells running a dozen rigs than McClendon & his boys did two years ago with 4 dozen rigs..

The Latest Oil Stats from the EIA

Wednesday's release of US oil data for the week ending July 15th by the Energy Information Administration indicated that our oil imports rebounded back to above recent averages, that our refineries ramped back up to seasonal levels to use all those extra imports, and as a result another small portion of our monstrous glut of crude oil was converted into a glut of refined products...our caveat for this review is that this week's crude oil fudge factor included to make the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet (line 13) balance out was +498,000 barrels per day, which meant that 498,000 more barrels per day showed up in our final consumption and inventory figures this week than were accounted for by our production and import figures, meaning one or several of this week's metrics were incorrect by that amount, errors which are typically due to inadequacies in gathering or reporting that data...that makes for the 4th week in a row when we've seen a large positive adjustment, and as a result this year's cumulative daily average of that weekly statistical adjustment has also turned positive by 18,000 barrels per day, after several months of being negative...during most of the weeks earlier this year, much of what we appeared to have produced or imported did not show up in the final consumption or inventory figures, and that statistical aberration has now completely reversed..

our field production of crude oil inched up for the 2nd week in a row, as oil output from US wells rose by 9,000 barrels per day to an average of 8,494,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 15th....again, like last week, the entirety of the increase resulted from a 38,000 barrel per day increase from Alaska, while production in the lower 48 was down 29,000 barrels per day....even with the back to back increases, our oil output still remained 725,000 barrels per day below the pace we saw at the beginning of this year, and was still 11.1% lower than the 9,562,000 barrels we produced during the week ending July 17th of 2015, and 11.6% lower than the record 9,610,000 barrel per day oil production that we saw during the week ending June 5th last year...

at the same time, the EIA reported that our imports of crude oil rose by an average of 293,000 barrels per day to an average of 8,134,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 15th, nearly a million barrels per day, or nearly 13% more than the 7,199,000 barrels of oil per day we were importing during the week ending July 17th a year ago...at the same time, the 4 week average of our imports reported by the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) actually slipped back to an 8.0 million barrel per day level, which was only 5.9% higher than during the same four-week period last year...

meanwhile, usage of that crude oil by U.S. refineries rose by 319,000 barrels per day from the prior week during the week ending July 15th, as the US refinery utilization rate rose to 93.2% during the week, up from 92.3% of capacity during the week ending July 8th...this week’s refinery throughput was virtually unchanged from the 16,870,000 barrels per day US refineries used during the week ending July 17th last year, however, when US refineries were operating at 95.5% of capacity..

even with the increase in refining, however, our refineries’ production of gasoline fell back from the elevated levels of last week, dropping by 168,000 barrels per day to an average of 10,050,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 15th...that was 0.6% lower than the 10,109,000 barrels per day of gasoline produced in the same week last year, but about 2% higher than last July's average output...at the same time, refinery output of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) also slipped, falling by 30,000 barrels per day to 5,004,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 15th....that also put distillates output 1.4% below the 5,073,000 barrels per day that was being refined the same week last year, which was on a par with distillates output for that month...it's a bit puzzling to see output of both gasoline and distillates down with such a large increase in refinery inputs, but i see no easy explanation; production of propane/propylene was up by 55,000 barrels per day to 1,734,000 barrels per day, and output of residual fuels was up by 24,000 barrels per day to 413,000 barrels per day, but production of jet fuel was also down, albeit by an insignificant 5,000 barrels per day to 1,722,000 barrels per day...

even with the large drop in our output of gasoline, our gasoline inventories rose again, by 911,000 barrels to 241,000,000 barrels as of July 15th, the fourth increase in the past 5 weeks, at a time of year when our gasoline supplies are usually being used up; in fact, July 15th saw the highest summertime level for gasoline supplies in the EIA's weekly records....contributing to the increase in gasoline inventories was a 57,000 barrel per day increase in our gasoline imports to 897,000 barrels per day, which was also 62,000 barrels per day more than the 815,000 barrels of gasoline we imported during the same week a year earlier....as a result, this week's gasoline inventories were 11.4% higher than the 216,285,000 barrels of gasoline that we had stored on July 17th last year, and also 10.6% higher than the 217,871,000 barrels of gasoline we had stored on July 18th of 2014... thus our gasoline supplies remain categorized by the EIA as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..

at the same time, our distillate fuel inventories fell by 216,000 barrels to 152,783,000 barrels on July 15th, using up a small portion of the 4,058,000 barrel distillates inventory increase to 152,997,000 barrels we saw a week ago...since our distillate inventories have continued to run far above the normal level after the warm winter reduced US heat oil consumption, our distillate inventories as of July 15th were still 8.0% higher than the 141,515,000 barrels of distillates we had stored as of July 17th last year, and 21.3% higher than our distillates supplies as of July 18th 2014, and thus they were again characterized as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year...

finally, as our refineries more than kept pace with our increased imports, we again needed to withdraw 2,342,000 more barrels of oil from our stocks of crude in storage to meet the week's need, as thus our crude oil inventories fell to 519,462,000 barrels as of July 15th....but that's a fairly normal withdrawal rate for this time of year, and it left us with 12.0% more oil in storage than the 463,885,000 barrels we had as of the same weekend a year earlier, and 40.0% more oil than we had stored on July 18th of 2014....with our oil supplies thus continuing to beat the seasonal records we set most every week in 2015, it should go without saying that our crude oil supplies also remain "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..."

This week's rig counts

US drilling activity increased for the 7th week out of the last 8 during the week ending July 22nd, with oil rigs seeing their largest percentage increase since December 2009, despite the lower prices for crude.....Baker Hughes reported that the total number of active rotary rigs running in the US was up by 15 rigs to 462 rigs as of Friday, which was still down from the 876 rigs that were deployed as of the July 24th report last year, and down from the recent high of 1929 rigs that were in use on November 21st of 2014...the number of rigs drilling for oil this week rose by 14 rigs to 371, which was still down from the 659 oil directed rigs that were in use a year earlier, and down from the recent high of 1609 oil rigs that were drilling on October 10, 2014, while the count of drilling rigs targeting natural gas formations fell by a single rig to 88 this week, which was also down from the 216 natural gas rigs that were drilling a year ago, and down from the recent high of 1,606 rigs that were drilling for natural gas on August 29th, 2008...there were also three rigs drilling this week that were classified as miscellaneous, up by 2 rigs from last week and also up by 2 miscellaneous rigs from the same week a year ago....

however, despite the large overall increase in drilling, three of the platforms that had been drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico were shut down this week, which reduced the Gulf of Mexico active rig count to 18 rigs, down from the 31 rigs working in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago...since there is also an offshore platform still working off the Cook Inlet in Alaska, the total offshore count fell to 19, also down from 31 a year ago....meanwhile, the inland waters rig count was unchanged at 3, down from the 4 rigs that were deployed drilling on inland waters at the end of the same week last year...

the number of working horizontal drilling rigs also increased for the 7th time in 8 weeks, rising by 13 rigs to 357, which still was down from the 662 horizontal rigs that were in use on July 24th of last year, and down from the record of 1372 horizontal rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014...at the same time, one directional rig and one vertical rigs were also added...that brought the working directional rig count up to 44 rigs, which was still down from the 83 directional rigs that were in use at the end of the same week a year earlier, and brought the vertical rig count up to 61 rigs as of July 22nd, which was nonetheless down from the 131 vertical rigs that were drilling in the US during the same week last year...

for the details on which states and which shale basins saw changes in drilling activity this past week, we'll again include a screenshot of that part of the rig count summary from Baker Hughes, which shows those changes...the first table below shows weekly and annual rig count changes by state, and the second table shows weekly and annual rig count changes for the major geological oil and gas basins...in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of July 22nd, the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs over the last week, the third column shows the prior week's rig count, the 4th column shows the change in the number of rigs running from the equivalent week in July a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that week a year ago, which in this case was July 24th of 2015:

what's immediately obvious from looking at those tables is that the entirely of the jump in drilling activity could be accounted for by the 15 rig increase in Texas, with an increase of 8 rigs in the west Texas Permian basin, 3 more rigs in the Barnett shale near Dallas/Ft Worth, and two additional rigs in the Eagle Ford of the southern part of the state...other states were relatively static, with only California up two rigs to 7 and Louisiana down two rigs to 44 showing a rig count change greater than 1, with the later accounted for by the 3 rig drop in the Gulf of Mexico...not included in the list of major state variances above, Nevada drillers started running a single rig this week, their first since last September, which left them unchanged from the 1 rig they had working a year ago...

this week's release of oil data for the week ending July 8th by the US Energy Information Administration indicated a modest increase in our national output of crude oil, a significant drop in our oil imports, and sizable increases in our supplies of refined products, despite an unseasonable cutback in refining....meanwhile, this week's crude oil fudge factor included to make the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet (line 13) balance was +452,000 barrels per day, which meant that 452,000 more barrels per day showed up in our final consumption and inventory figures this week than were accounted for by our production or import figures, meaning one or several of this week's metrics were incorrect by that amount, errors which are typically due to miscues in reporting or gathering that data...that makes for the 3rd week in a row when we've seen a large positive adjustment, which have served to bring this year's cumulative daily average of that weekly statistical adjustment factor down 0 barrels per day, which amazingly means that despite these large weekly errors, figures for the year to date have completely balanced out...

as we expected, last week's large drop in our field production of crude oil was partially reversed when oil production from Alaska, which had inexplicably fallen by 156,000 barrels per day last week, rose by 71,000 barrels per day this week, and thus was responsible for a 57,000 barrel per day increase to an average of 8,622,000 barrels per day of crude oil from US wells during the week ending July 8th....that increase - just the 3rd in the last 23 weeks – still left the week's oil production 11.3% lower than the 9,562,000 barrels we produced during the week ending July 10th of 2015, and 11.7% lower than the record 9,610,000 barrel per day oil production that we saw during the week ending June 5th last year...our oil production for the week ending July 8th was thus 734,000 barrels per day lower than we what were producing at the beginning of this year...

at the same time, the EIA reported that our imports of crude oil fell by 522,000 barrels per day to an average of 7,841,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 8th, which was still 487,000 barrels per day, or 6.6% more than the 7,354,000 barrels of oil per day we were importing during the week ending July 10th a year ago...at the same time, the 4 week average of our imports reported by the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) actually increased to an 8.1 million barrel per day level, which was 11.2% higher than the same four-week period last year...

meanwhile, crude oil usage by US refineries fell by 143,000 barrels per day, to average of 16,544,000 barrels of crude per day in this week's report...that was as the US refinery utilization rate fell for the 2nd week in a row to 92.3% for the week ending July 8th, down from 92.5% of capacity the prior week and from 93.0% of capacity 2 weeks ago, and in contrast with the refinery utilization rate of 95.3% during the week ending July 10th last year...this was to be expected, considering the product supply glut development we saw last week, wherein cargoes were left stuck sitting in New York harbor for lack of storage space; refining fell by 88,000 barrels per day on the east coast, and by 90,000 barrels per day in the Midwest, while it rose by a seasonal 60,000 barrels per day in the West, where the supply of products is closer to normal...crude oil refined this week was thus 1.7% lower than the 116,825,000 barrels per day US refineries used during the week ending July 10th last year, and also 1.0% lower than the equivalent week in 2014...

even with the pullback in refining, however, US refineries production of gasoline rose by 210,000 barrels per day to 10,218,000 barrels per day during week ending July 8th...that came even as east coast refineries were cutting back their gasoline production by 230,000 barrels per day, although that comes with the caveat that the regional gasoline production stats shown in this week's Petroleum Status Report are out of balance by 432,000 barrels per day...that increase meant that this week's gasoline production was 5.8% greater than the 9,658,000 barrels per day of gasoline produced during the equivalent week a year ago, despite the refinery slowdown....and also despite the refinery slowdown, their output of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) also rose during this week, climbing by 82,000 barrels per day to 5,034,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 8th...however, that was still 1.2% below our distillates production of 5,093,000 barrels per day during the week ending June 10th of last year......

with the large increase in gasoline production, our end of the week gasoline inventories rose by 1,213,000 barrels to 240,089,000 barrels as of July 8th, just a few thousand barrels from what we had stored on May 20th, before the driving season officially began on Memorial day...contributing to this week's increase in gasoline supplies was a 55,000 barrel per day increase to 820,000 barrels per day in our gasoline imports and a drop of 84,000 barrels per day in the amount of gasoline supplied to US markets, which fell to 9,671,000 barrels per day...as a result of that addition to supplies, this week's gasoline inventories were 10.1% higher than the 218,010,000 barrels of gasoline that we had stored on July 10th last year, and 11.9% higher than the 214,492,000 barrels of gasoline we had stored on July 11th of 2014, meaning our gasoline supplies are still categorized by the EIA as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..

this graph shows the monthly difference between the oil products demand statistics published weekly, shown in navy blue, and the oil products demand statistics published monthly, shown in teal blue, since the beginning of 2014…this total products graph includes not only gasoline, but also distillates, kerosene type jet fuels, residual oils, propane/propylene and other products, although gasoline does account for roughly half the total...you can see that over the past two years, the weekly estimates of demand for product have generally been excessive, and that since April of 2015, the weekly estimates of 'product supplied' have consistently been higher than what the final monthly readings have shown to be the case...and although the recent weekly data has shown that our consumption of oil products was at record levels in June, it has not yet been confirmed by the more accurate monthly data, which as of April appeared to be heading in the opposite direction, implying a revision of a whopping 800,000 barrels a day...

returning to this week's data, our distillate fuel inventories rose by 4,058,000 barrels to end the week at 152,997,000 barrels, as distillates were added to storage in every region of the country, bumping our distillate inventories up to the highest since the week ending May 6th...as our distillate inventories had already been so much above normal level after the warm winter reduced US heat oil consumption, our distillate inventories as of July 8th were thus 8.3% higher than the 141,280,000 barrels of distillates we had stored at the same weekend last year, and 23.1% higher than our distillates supplies as of July 11th 2014, and therefore they're also characterized as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year...

finally, even with the drop in refining, the larger drop in our imports meant that we needed to withdraw 2,546,000 more barrels of oil from our stocks of crude in storage to meet the week's need, as thus our crude oil inventories fell by that amount to 521,804,000 barrels as of July 8th...but since national oil inventories even fell by more in the equivalent year ago week, this week's stores were still 13.1% higher than the 461,417,000 barrels of oil we had stored as of July 10th, 2015, and 39.1% higher than the 375,040,000 barrels of oil we had stored on July 11th of 2014....with our oil inventories thus continuing to be that much higher than the seasonal records we set most every week in 2015, it's obvious that our crude oil supplies are also "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..."

This week's rig counts

even with the nominally lower prices for oil and gas, US drilling activity increased for the 6th week out of the past 7 weeks during the week ending July 15th, as contracting and hiring for this week's new drilling was probably already underway weeks ago, when prices were higher.....Baker Hughes reported that the total count of active rotary rigs running in the US increased by 7 rigs to 447 rigs as of July 15th, which was still down from the 857 rigs that were deployed as of the July 17th report last year, and down from the recent high of 1929 rigs that were in use the week before the OPEC meeting of Thanksgiving 2014...the number of rigs drilling for oil this week rose by 6 rigs to 357, which was still down from the 638 oil directed rigs that were in use a year earlier, and down from the recent high of 1609 oil rigs that were drilling on October 10, 2014, while the count of drilling rigs targeting natural gas formations rose by a single rig to 89 this week, which was down from the 218 natural gas rigs that were drilling a year ago, and down from the recent high of 1,606 rigs that were drilling for natural gas on August 29th, 2008...there was also still one rig running this week that was classified as miscellaneous, unchanged from last week and unchanged from the same week a year ago....

of the drilling rigs that were added this week, three were offshore on drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which brought the Gulf of Mexico active rig count back up to 21 rigs, which was still down from 31 Gulf of Mexico rigs a year ago...that also increased the total offshore rig count to 22, as there still is an offshore platform working off the Cook Inlet in Alaska....at the same time, there was a rig removed that had been drilling through an inland lake in southern Louisiana, which cut the inland waters rig count down to 3, which was still up from the 2 rigs that were deployed drilling on inland waters at the end of the same week last year...

the number of working horizontal drilling rigs also increased for the 6th time in 7 weeks, but only by one this week, as the count of active horizontal rigs increased to 344 rigs, which still was down from the 650 horizontal rigs that were in use on July 17th of last year, and down from the record of 1372 horizontal rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014...at the same time, 7 directional rigs were added, bringing the directional rig count up to 43, which was still down from the 84 directional rigs that were in use at the end of the same week a year earlier...meanwhile, the vertical rig count fell by a single rig to 60 rigs this week, which was also down from the 123 vertical rigs that were drilling in the US during the same week last year...

for the details on which states and which shale basins saw changes in drilling activity this past week, we'll again include a screenshot of that part of the rig count summary from Baker Hughes, which shows those changes...the first table below shows weekly and annual rig count changes by state, and the second table shows weekly and annual rig count changes for the major geological oil and gas basins...in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of July 15th, the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs over the last week, the third column shows the July 8th rig count, the 4th column shows the change in the number of rigs running from the equivalent week in July a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that week a year ago, which in this case was July 17th of 2015:

from these tables we can see that New Mexico and Louisiana by themselves accounted for the entirely of this week's drilling increase, with other states adding or idling one rig a piece as noted...also note that the net of 1 additional horizontal rig this week came by way of shutting down at least 6 such rigs, including 4 that had been drilling into the Barnett shale of the Dallas-Ft Worth area, and adding at least 7 horizontal drillers elsewhere...among states not shown above, Idaho saw the addition of 1 rig this week, their first since December, as a year ago they had no rigs running...Illinois also saw their rig count increase by 1 to 3 rigs; that was up from the 2 rigs they were running in the same week last year, and Mississippi also saw the addition of 1 rig, giving them 2, which was down from the 4 rigs deployed in Mississippi on July 17th of 2015...meanwhile, Nebraska had its only active rig shut down this week, a year ago they were running two in the state....in addition, the rig that started drilling in Hawaii on April 29th wrapped up whatever it was doing there and was pulled out this week; a year ago, there were no rigs in Hawaii...

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Shillary is suppose to announce her VP pick on Friday.Who ever it may be (most likely Tim Kaine) will be going to a lot of state funerals over seas just to stay busy and out of the way.I have always believed that candidates of both parties should announce their choice for Sec. of State, and Sec. of Defense (War) when they pick their VP.The people have a right to know who will lead them into the abyss.Both positions are more important than the VP gig.Who ever takes those slots should know that they will be the fall guy when something goes wrong. And it most certainly will.Their heads will be on the chopping block in a nano-second due to her imperialist, exceptionalist, interventionist, capitalism uber alles foreign policy.Why does America not have a Sec. of Peace?Oh thats right, America's business is business. And that business is run by Wall Street and the MIC.Hillary is their shill. She has been bought and paid for to do their bidding.Worst than that is that their ideology is the same.She does not obey their commands, she promotes them with her own free will.They are of the same mind set.Shillary will make an excellent barker for both, putting them on a pedestal.But she will leave the common people on Main Street in the gutters and the sewers.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Despite concentration of people and infrastructure around Seoul, deployment to Seongju leaves it out of range

On July 13, South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense announced that Seongju County in North Gyeongsang Province had been chosen as the site for the THAAD missile defense system. Deploying THAAD in Seongju means Seoul and its suburbs will fall outside of THAAD’s defense range, while most of the key US military installations will fall inside it. This is likely to strengthen suspicions that the real motivation for deploying THAAD is to protect US forces in South Korea.READ MORE Funny how that works.First they give it the ok.Then they announce where it will be placed.Along with what it will and will not cover.If North and South Korea go to war all S/Korean forces are under the US command.This reason alone makes S/Korea a US colony and a non sovereign land.Tao Dao Man

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

We get what we deserve. The establishment machine for Wall Street and the MIC keeps getting greased, as it greases our politicians.Sanders is a fraud and a traitor.If he was truth to power he would have ran on the Green ticket which Stein offered him.Instead he sold out and now is bought and paid for like all the rest.America and democracy should not be used in the same sentence.It is an oxymoron.We are now a plutocracy, so get used to it.Candidates, elections, the voting booth, ammendments, none of these can bring about true change.Only total collapse of the system (machine) will bring about true change to benefit Main Street and not Wall Street.

Capitalism is not in crisis, it is the crisis.It is enslaving the world with its boot prints.Our military does not go to war for democracy, or for the security of Americans.It goes to war in foreign lands for the Multi-National Corporations and Banksters.America's business is business. It is not to help the less fortunate of our country or the world.If you insist on voting.Then have the balls that Sanders does not have and at least vote for the Green party.

the oil data for the week ending July 1st, released by the US Energy Information Administration on Thursday of this week because of the Monday holiday, indicated a big jump in our oil imports, a large drop in our output of crude oil, crude refining levels that were virtually unchanged from a week earlier, and modest withdrawals of crude oil and refined products from storage...meanwhile, the crude oil fudge factor included on the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet (line 13) was +176,000 barrels per day, down from last week's +537,000 barrels per day, which still meant that 176,000 more barrels per day showed up in our final consumption and inventory figures this week than were accounted for by our production or import figures, meaning one or several of this week's metrics were off by that amount, errors which are typically due to miscues in reporting or gathering that data...however, the past two weeks have served to bring the cumulative daily average of that weekly statistical adjustment factor down to -17,000 barrels per day, which means that figures for the year to date are almost coming into balance...

at any rate, the EIA reported that our imports of crude oil rose by 808,000 barrels per day to an average of 8,363,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 1st, after falling 884,000 barrels per day to an average of 7,555,000 barrels per day during the week ending June 24th...this week's imports were at the 3rd highest weekly level in the last 34 months and 14.3% higher than our imports of 7,316,000 barrels per day the same week a year earlier, but as you’ve seen, oil imports are quite volatile week to week, so the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) reports imports as a 4 week moving average...that summary showed that the 4 week average of our imports rose back to the 8.0 million barrel per day level, which was 11.6% higher than the same four-week period last year...

at the same time, the EIA reported that our field production of crude oil fell by 194,000 barrels per day, from an average of 8,622,000 barrels per day during the week ending June 24th to an average of 8,428,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 1st...that appears to be the largest one week drop in our oil output since the last week of August 2012, a production drop that was precipitated at that time by the movement of Hurricane Isaac through the Gulf of Mexico…thus such a drop in output would certainly be a matter of concern if the drop were more widespread, but as it was,156,000 barrels per day of that output drop was cut from Alaska output, which must have had issues that weren't reported on...production in the lower 48 states was down by a modest 38,000 barrels per day to 8,088,000 barrels per day, and if Alaska production returns to the mean, that would suggest we might see a overall production rebound....as it was, this week's oil production was 12.2% below our production of 9,604,000 barrels per day during the same week of 2015, and the lowest since the same amount of oil was produced during the week ending May 9th of 2014....

during the same week, U.S. refineries’ crude oil usage slipped by an insignificant 8,000 barrels per day, from the average of 16,695,000 barrels of crude per day they used during the week ending June 24th to an average of 16,687,000 barrels for the week ending July 1st....that was as the US refinery utilization rate fell to 92.5% during the week, from 93.0% of capacity the prior week, which was still below the refinery utilization rate of 94.7% during the week ending July 3rd last year...nonetheless, this week's refinery throughput was still a half percent higher than the 16,596,000 barrels per day refinery throughput of that week last last year, and also higher than any prior equivalent week in the 34 recent years of EIA data, so they're not exactly slouching...

with refineries throughput little changed, their production of gasoline rose by 59,000 barrels per day to 10,018,000 barrels per day, up from the 9,959,000 barrels per day we produced during the week ending June 24th, which was also 1.5% more than the 9,868,000 barrels of gasoline per day we were producing during the same week last year...at the same time, our refineries output of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) fell by 69,000 barrels per day to 4,952,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 1st, which was 2.7% below our distillates production level of 5,092,000 barrels per day during the week ending July 3rd of last year...

with the small increase in gasoline production, our end of the week gasoline inventories fell by just 122,000 barrels to 238,876,000 barrels as of July 1st, as our gasoline imports fell by 139,000 barrels per day to 747,000 barrels per day and gasoline supplied to US markets rose by 46,000 barrels per day to 9,755,000 barrels per day....that means our midsummer gasoline inventories are still a quarter million barrels above the level of the pre-driving season gasoline inventories of May 27th, and thus our gasoline supplies remained 9.6% higher than the 217,952,000 barrels of gasoline that we had stored on July 3rd last year, and 11.5% higher than the 214,321,000 barrels of gasoline we had stored on July 4th of 2014….thus our gasoline supplies are still categorized by the EIA as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year.. ...

now here's where the sticky wicket we mentioned earlier comes in; despite the fact that our summer inventories of gasoline are always lower than our winter inventories, this summer our gasoline inventories have remained high on the east coast, even as they were reduced somewhat seasonally elsewhere...as a result, storage is at capacity on the east coast, and full vessels of refined product remain anchored outside of New York Harbor with no where to offload their products…ultimately, such full storage is also forcing regional refineries to curtail their production...the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) reports on and includes graphs of the stores of oil and each of the major refined products nationally and by region, so we'll include the graph of the east coast gasoline inventory history below, so you can see what's happened...

in the graph above, copied from figure 2 on page 12 of the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf), the blue line shows the recent track of East Coast gasoline inventories over the period from January 2015 to July 1st, 2016, while the grey shaded area represents the range of East Coast gasoline inventories as reported weekly by the EIA over the prior 5 years for any given time of year, basically showing us the normal range of East Coast gasoline inventories as they fluctuated from season to season over the 5 years prior to the year and a half shown by the blue line....(note that PADD = Petroleum Administration for Defense District, one of the 5 regions of the country that the EIA keeps separate records for...a map of the 5 PADDs is here; PADD 1 includes all the states on the east coast plus W. Virginia..) from this graph above, we can see that gasoline supplies in this region first breached 65 million barrels in February of 2015 when they rose to over 70 million barrels, then topped that record by 2 million barrels this this winter...however, instead of falling in the spring and summer as they usually do, regional gasoline inventories rose to hit a new record at the end of June, only slightly backing off this week; (note that the five years prior to this years data now includes the record 70 million barrels level set in 2015)...you can check page 12 of this weeks Petroleum Status Report for similar graphs of the other PAD districts, and you'd see that they're all down somewhat normally for this time of year...but that doesn't ease the glut in the New York area, because all the product pipelines were built to deliver product into that densely populated area, not send products out...

the regional graphs for distillate fuel inventories, which you can find on page 14 of the Petroleum Status Report, show the same situation for PADD 1, which is exacerbated by a similar oversupply in Europe, the normal export destination for surplus distillates...for the week ending July 1st, our distillate fuel inventories fell by 1,574,000 barrels to end the week at 148,939,000 barrels, as again distillates were withdrawn from storage in every region except the east coast...but since our distillate inventories have been well above normal since the El Nino winter reduced US heat oil consumption, our distillate inventories are still 8.4% higher than the 137,461,000 barrels of distillates we had stored as of July 3rd last year, and 22.3% higher than our distillates supplies as of July 4th 2014, and thus they're also characterized as "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year...

finally, with the big increase of imports, the withdrawal of oil from our stocks of crude in storage was a slightly lower than normal 2,223,000 barrels for the week, leaving our oil inventories at 524,350,000 barrels as of July 1st...however, that was still 12.6% higher than the 465,763,000 barrels of oil we had stored as of July 3rd, 2015, and 37.1% higher than the 382,565,000 barrels of oil we had stored on July 4th of 2014....with our oil inventories thus continuing to be that much higher than the seasonal records we set most every week in 2015, our crude oil supplies are also "well above the upper limit of the average range" for this time of year..."

This Week's Rig Counts

US drilling activity increased for the 5th week week out of the past 6 during the week ending July 8th, following a string of 41 consecutive weeks without a net increase in total active rigs.....Baker Hughes reported that the total count of active rotary rigs running in the US increased by 9 rigs to 440 rigs during the week ending July 8th, which was down from the 863 rigs that were deployed as of the July 10th report last year, and down from the recent high of 1929 rigs that were in use on November 21st of 2014...the number of rigs drilling for oil this week rose by 10 rigs to 351, which was down from the 645 oil directed rigs that were in use a year earlier, and down from the recent high of 1609 oil rigs that were drilling on October 10, 2014, while the count of drilling rigs targeting natural gas formations again fell by a single rig to 88 as of July 8th, which was down from the 217 natural gas rigs that were drilling a year ago, and down from the recent high of 1,606 rigs that were drilling for natural gas that were deployed on August 29th, 2008...there was also still one rig running this week that was classified as miscellaneous, unchanged from last week and no different than the miscellaneous count of the same week a year ago....

the number of working horizontal drilling rigs also increased for the fifth time in six weeks, as their count rose by 11 rigs to 343 rigs this week, which was still down from the 654 horizontal rigs that were in use on July 10th of last year, and down from the record of 1372 horizontal rigs that were in use on November 21st of 2014...during this same week, a net of two directional rigs were pulled down, leaving 36 directional rigs still working, which was down from the 88 directional rigs that were drilling at this time last year....meanwhile, the vertical rig count was unchanged at 61 rigs, which was still down from the 121 vertical rigs that were drilling in the US during the same week last year...

for the details on which states and which shale basins saw changes in drilling activity this past week, we'll again include a screenshot of that part of the rig count summary from Baker Hughes, which shows those changes...the first table below shows weekly and annual rig count changes by state, and the second table shows weekly and annual rig count changes for the major geological oil and gas basins...in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of July 8th the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs since July 1st, the third column shows the July 1st rig count, the 4th column shows the change in the number of rigs running from the equivalent week a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that week a year ago, which in this case was July 10th of 2015:

International Rig Counts for June

Friday also saw the monthly release of the international rig counts for June, which unlike the weekly count, is an average of the number of rigs running in each country during the month, rather than the total of those drilling at month end....Baker Hughes reported that an average of 1407 rigs were drilling for oil and natural gas around the globe in June, which was up from the 1,405 rigs that were drilling around the globe in May but down from the 2,136 rigs that were working globally in June of last year...increased North American drilling accounted for the global increase for the first time since July of 2015, as the average US rig count rose from 408 rigs in May to 417 rigs in June, which was still down from 861 rigs in June a year ago, while the average Canadian rig count rose from 42 rigs in May to 63 in June, again still down from 129 rigs in June a year earlier....outside of Northern America, the International rig count fell by 28 rigs to 927 in June, which was also down from 1,158 rigs a year ago, as every other region of the globe saw a decrease in drilling activity for the month...

drilling in the Middle East fell for the 5th time in the past 6 months, as the region's activity was down by 2 rigs to a June average of 389, which was also down from the 401 rigs deployed in the Middle East a year earlier...the regional pullback was entirely accounted for by the idling of 3 rigs working offshore, lowering the offshore count to 49, which was one more than the 48 rigs the Middle East had working offshore in June a year ago....the largest drilling activity decline was in Oman, where their active rig count fell from 69 to 66, which was also down from the 71 rigs working in Oman last year at this time....both Egypt and Iraq saw two rigs idled in June; for Egypt, that left 26 rigs running, down from 41 rigs a year earlier, and for Iraq, that left 41 rigs working, down from the 53 rigs they had deployed in June of 2015...on the other hand, Pakistan saw the addition of 3 more rigs, after they had added 4 rigs in May; that brought their average June count up to 30 rigs, which was also up from the 17 rigs that were drilling in Pakistan a year earlier...meanwhile, the Saudis also added a rig, bringing their active rig count up to 124, which was also up from the 121 rigs they had deployed last June....the Saudis have been averaging a deployment of 125 rigs over the past year, which is up from their average of 105 rigs in 2014, so their drilling has not skipped a beat as oil prices fell by more than half..

at the same time, the Latin American countries pulled out another 10 rigs, after pulling out 15 rigs in both April and May, and hence the region is now down by 92 rigs since the first of the year…Latin America averaged 178 rigs in June, including 31 offshore, down from the total of 314 rigs, which included 62 offshore rigs, that were active in Latin America in June of 2015....Argentina saw the largest drop, as they were down by 8 rigs to 63, which was down from the 104 rigs that were in use in Argentina a year ago...Venezuela idled 7 more rigs, after shutting down 9 in May, and they're thus down to 53 active rigs, from the 66 rigs that were deployed in Venezuela in June of last year...Mexico also shut down 2 rigs in June, leaving 20 still working; that was down from the 51 rigs working Mexico in June of last year...on the other hand, Ecuador restarted 3 rigs in June, bringing their active count back up to 5 rigs, which was still down from the 15 rigs they were running a year earlier, and Columbia, which had cut their active rig count from 30 all the way down to 2 over the nine months ending April, added 2 rigs in June after adding 3 in May, which brought them back up to 7 rigs, which was still down from the 26 rigs they had deployed last June...

meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific region had 182 drilling rigs working in June, down from 190 rigs working in May, and down from the 215 rigs working the region a year earlier, with the Asia-Pacific offshore count steady at 86...Australia, Indonesia, and Thailand each cut 3 rigs, leaving Australia with 3 rigs working, down from 15 a year earlier, leaving Indonesia with 16 rigs, down from 23 a year earlier, and leaving Thailand with 12 rigs, down from the 19 rigs the Thais were running last June...at 29, there were also 2 fewer rigs working offshore of China, down from 31 rigs in May but still up from the 24 rigs working offshore of China in June a year ago...at the same time, Indian drillers started 6 additional rigs, bringing the count in India to 108 rigs, still down from 113 rigs a year earlier...

elsewhere, countries in Africa shut down 4 rigs in June, leaving 87 still in use, down from the 103 rigs working the African continent last year at this time...Algerians accounted for half the decrease, as they were down 2 rigs to 53, which was still up from the 51 rigs Algeria had active a year earlier...Nigeria, Cameroon, and South Africa each idled a rig, leaving 5 in Nigeria and left none working in either Cameroon and South Africa...at the same time, Congo restarted the rig they had idled in May, and now have 2 rigs running, down from 3 a year earlier....lastly, the rig count in Europe also fell by 4 to 91 in June, which was down from the 113 rigs working in Europe a year ago at this time...Sakhalin island, off the east coast of Russia but included in the European count, idled two rigs, leaving 8 rigs still active, same as a year ago...at the same time, Norway, Denmark and Iceland each shut down a rig; for Denmark and Iceland, that reverses their additions in May, for Norway, it’s a reduction to 16 rigs, down from 19 a year earlier...the United Kingdom also added a fracking rig in June, which is currently their only land based rig, as they also had none on land a year ago...finally, note that Iran, Russia, and China rig counts are not included in Baker Hughes international data, although China's offshore area, with an average of 29 rigs active in June, is included in the Asian totals here...

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